Carrie Allen, PhD, is an associate professor of Learning Sciences at the University of North Texas (UNT). She is a co-director of the Learning Institute - a research institute at UNT that advances interdisciplinary scholarship in the learning sciences and aims to bridge research and practice. Additionally, she is the associate director of the Advanced Environmental Research Institute (AERI), which catalyzes research and outreach connected to human and environmental relationships. Furthermore, she is the Director of Partnerships for the Office of Research Consulting and Texas Research and Evaluation Network for Development (TREND), which supports research-practice partnerships in K-12 education in the North Texas region.  

Her work is principally driven by the desire to address inequities within educational systems, with particular attention to socially just and equitable learning designs in STEM education. Through her scholarship, she aims to make visible existing inequalities, develop and utilize designs for equitable learning environments, and foster deep, humanizing relationships that support a revisioning of possibilities for teaching and learning. Guiding this work are perspectives that help theorize how local phenomena are mediated by broader structures, histories and enduring sociocultural practices; the ingenuity and agency of local actors; and designs that facilitate lasting change within teaching and learning. Toward this work, she employs qualitative, design-based and participatory research methodologies in order to design with and for youth and educators, centering their local expertise toward bringing about transformative learning and institutional change. Allen's research has been published in journals such as the "Journal of Learning Sciences," "Journal of Teacher Education," "Journal of Research in Science Teaching," and AERJ.

Xi Lu, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo in the Information Science Department, jointly with the Computer Science & Engineering Department. She conducts extensive research at the intersection of human-computer interaction and personal informatics, focusing on designing and studying self-tracking technologies that promote health and wellness. Her work extends beyond individual use to explore how socio-cultural contexts shape people’s technology practices and needs. She is particularly interested in stigmatized health domains, such as women’s health and public health crises, where both healthcare systems and the technology industry often marginalize individuals. Her research appears regularly in leading HCI venues—ACM CHI, CSCW, IMWUT, and DIS—and includes a CHI 2025 Best Paper Award. 

Participants explored applications of virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality as a learning tool. 

Jim Slotta, PhD is a professor and the president's chair in knowledge technologies and education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

Talk Abstract: Slotta will review prior work on a model for collective inquiry known as KCI: Knowledge, Community and Inquiry. As a pedagogical model, KCI guides the design of curriculum units that engage the classroom as a learning community, producing a knowledge base and assessable learning outcomes that target specified learning goals.  I will also discuss recent work relating to smart classrooms for learning communities, including a flexible AI infrastructure called the SCripting and ORchestration Environment (SCORE) as well as a new authoring environment called the Intelligent Design Environment for Active Learning (IDEAL).  Together, this work supports a vision for designing and enacting powerful new forms of collective inquiry, leveraging AI in ways that bring students and teachers together as a community.  I will also discuss recent work on a project called the Critical Action Learning Exchange (CALE), which explores the creation of an inquiry curriculum that helps students form identity and gain meaning and purpose in their learning.

Wade Berger, PhD, is a Learning Sciences researcher whose agenda spans informal learning, community-based partnerships and the infrastructures that shape access to educational opportunity.

Talk Abstract: Berger will introduce community-wide infrastructuring as a framework for studying how hidden systems like transportation, scheduling, relationships and funding shape access to learning across communities. His talk extends theories of infrastructuring to the scale of neighborhoods and cities, showing how these systems influence equity and participation in learning ecosystems. He will share examples and visual models that connect this work to ongoing questions about how we intervene in community-wide ways and work to design learning-centered communities.

Kenneth Joseph, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the associate director for AI and society at the Institute for AI and Data Science at the University at Buffalo.

Talk Abstract: In this talk, Joseph will share some of his past research and current thinking on how people—both implicitly and explicitly—present themselves and their beliefs on social media. He'll focus on a line of work that examines how individuals construct their identities in Twitter/X bios, how and when people express political beliefs online and what we can (and can't) learn about the complex, dynamic relationship between social identity and political attitudes from social media data.

Sharon Ince, PhD is the assistant dean for information technology and collection services/associate professor at Seton Hall University Libraries in South Orange, NJ.

Talk Abstract: This talk will discuss research workflows and practices among early-career education scholars. As traditionally libraries held the monopoly on information, the shift in access to information and tools has changed practices. Fragmented tools play a heavy part in piecing together workflows for conducting research, as seamless integrations do not exist. The study examines how early-career scholars are constructing their scholarly workflows and recommends best practices for supporting their workflows. Preliminary answers to these questions will be discussed to help with programming, training, and identifying how academic libraries can support doctoral students and postdoc research work.

Charles Logan is a PhD candidate in the learning sciences program at Northwestern University.

Talk Abstract: As teachers, school administrators and policymakers debate how, if at all, to use generative artificial intelligence platforms like Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in education, there is wide agreement that young people should learn about AI. In this session, Logan will share findings from a six-week summer program for high school students that explored the ethics of AI in education, police surveillance and social media. His study focuses on an hour-long discussion that features students confronting and contemplating AI’s often obscured ecologies, from the grueling labor required to produce popular tools like ChatGPT to the environmental costs of training and maintaining generative AI. Drawing on a theoretical framework that positions youth as “philosophers of technology,” Logan examines what critical analyses of generative AI the youth constructed, and how conducting this sensemaking about the technology supported youth in describing hopeful and harmful relations between themselves, the technology, other people, and the planet. His findings suggest the importance of expanding the ethical terrain young people traverse when considering what place generative AI may–and may not–have in our collective present and future.

Event Co-Sponsor: University at Buffalo Department of Engineering Education

Talk Abstract: The political conversation has coopted some vocabulary and made it difficult to advance conversations, research and explorations in some hotly contested areas. In this talk, Pérez-Quiñones will present an existing definition of equity in health and draw parallels between HCI design and equitable grading practices. His work on the two seemingly unrelated domains has a foundation of concern for closing the disparities that exist in society through technological interventions. With examples of a study of bilinguals, Dr. Pérez-Quiñones shows how technology design heavily influenced by the ideology of monolingualism creates additional burdens for bilingual users. Armed with data from focus groups as well as personal experiences, he makes the argument that technology is forcing bilingual users to pick a language. This has implications for education, and open communications across language communities, and could create hidden chasms in society.

Melissa McCartney, PhD, Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, University at Buffalo

Talk Abstract: An abundance of STEM jobs are projected to go unfilled. Researchers have previously investigated demographics and attrition rates for the lack of STEM graduates available to fill vacancies, however, there is potential for additional research examining the impact of career development courses (CDCs). Very little research has been conducted regarding CDCs within undergraduate STEM initiatives. The few studies available link CDCs to retention within STEM majors, however, retention is not the same as entering the workforce. We should not assume that students are progressing toward their intended STEM careers simply because they have persisted in STEM. We may lose qualified STEM graduates because they do not know how to navigate the workforce.

McCartney's lab has developed a questionnaire to examine the impact of student experiences that likely impact career development. The questionnaire measures dependent variables, for example, career goal and strategy development, and student experiences (i.e., independent variables), including participation in research and mentoring experiences. McCartney will present initial results from this large data collection as well as pilot data from our first longitudinal analysis.

Talk Abstract: This talk centers how embodied theories of learning, informed by the artistic practices of dancers, can reframe what is learned in STEAM spaces and how it can be learned (and analyzed). In particular, this talk looks at how choreographic-based, expansive views of embodied learning can reframe uncertainty as a common feeling in science learning that is often used to discount participation and instead can be generative for ensemble thinking and learning. Across two primary studies, Vogelstein demonstrates how incorporating ensemble-based, choreographic practices into STEM learning environments can expand learners' sensemaking resources (e.g., movement proposals and responses) and support learning by both youth and adult researchers alike. Choreographic inquiry practices offer new ways to support embodied STEM learning that center equitable forms of ensemble participation while broadening the domain-specific conceptual terrain in ways that are generative for the Learning Sciences.

Talk Abstract: Addressing the planet’s most urgent socio-ecological challenges requires coordination across individuals, institutions, the built environment, and the natural world. This kind of coordination is complex and involves learning at different scales of practice. In this  presentation I describe my dissertation work, which seeks to better understand learning at the scale of the neighborhood, through a collaborative filmmaking project. Residents of a predominantly white, densifying Seattle neighborhood led a series of local walking tours, filmed these tours, and assembled the footage into a documentary film. By theorizing civic learning as a semiotic process, I examine how discourses related to neighborhood and community life inform participants’ modes of expression; and how these modes of expression are laminated into modes of relation over the course of the study. Findings show that discourses of care, accessibility, and groundedness emerge and transform through participants’ ongoing place-storying and infrastructuring efforts. From this analysis, I suggest implications for planners, education researchers, and others interested in creating civic media and designing civic learning environments.

Talk Abstract: With the rapid development of technology, young children now have access to various technologies such as tablets, VR/AR, and AI. More importantly, there remain questions about how we can use such technology to support young children’s learning through interaction in rich sociocultural contexts. Building on Cultural Historically Activity Theory (CHAT) and Learning Embodied Activity Framework (LEAF), my work focuses on designing age-appropriate science learning activities within a Mixed Reality environment. In my presentation, she will first showcase her designs for collective embodied play that facilitate science modeling in MR. Next, I will address the challenges of assessing embodied learning in MR environments through traditional methods. I will share my mixed methods approaches to documenting young learners' collective embodied learning, offering a comprehensive view of their educational experiences.

Talk Abstract: Climate change threats are ever increasing, forcing communities to ask: what do they value and how are they going to protect it? Community-based climate education should play a central role in supporting equitable local decisions regarding local responses to climate challenges. However, there is little research about how to best support communities, especially rural communities that may be skeptical of climate change, to see how climate change is affecting their landscapes. Guided by the perspectives and practices of critical data science and story listening, I frame my research around data and story. Prior work has considered the role of climate data within environmental education and story within community scholarship, but there is still a need to explore expanded notions of data within community learning and the role of community-held stories in local decision-making. My work focuses on how local, personally held landscape and climate data might complement and extend local, institutionally held data and how map building might support data-rich storytelling and listening. In this talk I will share my community-based work building a map with six residents of a conservative-leaning, rural community and how collaborative map design supported participants to convene knowledge about local landscape and climate, ratify that knowledge through inclusion onto a public map, and ultimately inform community decision making. I found the collaborative map building process allowed local, often generationally held, climate and landscape knowledge to become community-held understanding, pointing to a pathway for engaging community members in understanding how local and beyond-local socio-cultural values and systems are physically embodied in their local landscapes.

Talk Abstract: Chicanas and other women of color (WOC) have long centered embodied knowledge and storytelling as a critical part of intergenerational healing and learning. However, these experiences are not typically accounted for and are often invisibilized. Dr. Wendy Barrales, PhD explores what we might learn when we attune, document, and account for intergenerational WOC experiences across time and space. Grounded in arts-based methods and feminista embodied knowledge, this research showcases the creation of the Women of Color Archive (WOCArchive), a digital storytelling project preserving the stories of matriarchs of color. Through an emphasis on the feminist praxis of process over product, Barrales’s purpose is twofold: first, to describe how the digital art pieces and archive were co-created alongside youth and showcased at a public art exhibition and, second, to center and celebrate WOC as experts and knowledge producers. Through documenting, preserving, and amplifying their stories, Barrales's research attempts to begin giving women of color their flowers. 

Join us as we explore the pivotal role of learning sciences in addressing societal issues. A distinguished panel of experts will discuss the intersection of research, design, and interdisciplinary collaboration in shaping the future of the field.